Out of sympathy for the peasant uprising and the peasant revolution, the Dashun Army in Li Zicheng was quickly defeated one month after its defeat in Shanhaiguan World War I, which was very regrettable. Li Zicheng's failure often comes down to complacency, alienation from the masses and corruption after entering the city. Li Zicheng Uprising was a feudal guardian who committed insurrection and cursed Li Zicheng's army as thieves, burning, killing and looting, committing all kinds of evils, and the devil takes the hindmost. Some boring literati relished the stories of Wu Sangui and Chen Yuanyuan, and simply attributed Li Zicheng's failure to Liu Zongmin's occupation of Chen Yuanyuan and Wu Sangui's anger at beautiful women.

In recent years, there have been articles on the Internet saying that the rapid fall of Li Zicheng was due to the plague and so on.

In fact, if we look at the failure of Li Zicheng Dashun regime in the context of regime change in the late Ming Dynasty, we will have a more appropriate understanding of its failure. A great man put it well: We should not only be good at breaking the old world, but also be good at building a new one. The key to Li Zicheng's rapid failure is that he broke the old world in a hurry before he was ready to build a new world.

1. The demise of the Ming Dynasty is a historical necessity.

Ming Dynasty is one of the many feudal dynasties in Chinese history. Its course, like other dynasties, has its rise, stagnation and decline, and it can't escape its fate. It is impossible for the Ming Dynasty to live forever for 80,000 years like a tortoise, as some people hope, and then develop capitalism and implement the industrial revolution on its own, and be declared a constitutional monarchy by Emperor Zhu, leading the new trend in the world.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, all kinds of decadent forces had reached their peak and the whole state system had collapsed. It is impossible to mediate various social contradictions by relying on the mechanism and strength of the dynasty itself. A large amount of land was annexed to the hands of the ruling class and landlords, and a large number of bankrupt farmers lived on the verge of death. The whole dynasty was on the verge of disorderly collapse. Any accident may lead to the outbreak of total collapse. As for whether the peasant uprising or the northern minorities went south, or both, it was a historical accident.

Two. Three rebel political and military groups

1. Manchu regime

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, it was not the peasant uprising that first rebelled against the Ming regime, but Nuerhachi, the leader of the Nuzhen tribe in Jianzhou, northeast of the Ming Dynasty.

During the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty 1 1 (1583), in May, Nurhachi took 13 armor left by his grandfather and father and 30 people from his headquarters, and started his 30-year-long war to unify the ministries of the Nuzhen in Northeast China. In the forty-fourth year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, on the first day of the first month of 16 16, the Eight Banners Minister Nurhachi and Baylor held a ceremony to honor Nurhachi as Khan and establish the Jin regime (known as the "later Jin" in history to distinguish it from the Jin State in the Song Dynasty). 16 18 years, he sacrificed to heaven with the "seven great hates" and set out to cut down the Ming Dynasty. After Nurhachi died, his son Huang Taiji succeeded to the throne. 1635 changed its surname to Manchuria (Manchu for short), and changed its name to "Qing" the following year.

By 1644, after decades of efforts by Nurhachi and Huang Taiji, the Manchu regime cleared all the military strongholds of the Ming Dynasty in Liaodong except Ningyuan and reached Shanhaiguan. Through military, appeasement, marriage and other means, Manchu captured the Mongolian ministries in southern Mongolia and established the Eight Banners of Mongolia except the Eight Banners of Manchuria. Through surrender and rebellion, the Eight Banners of the Han Army, which mainly controlled firearms, were established, and a number of civil servants and military commanders of the Ming Dynasty were accepted. Through military repression, the North Korean regime, which paid tribute to the Ming Dynasty, was forced to submit to the Qing Dynasty.

2. Li Zicheng Dashun regime and Zhang Daxi regime.

In March of the following year 1627, Wang Er, a farmer from Baishui, Shaanxi Province, led hundreds of people into Chengcheng County, which opened the prelude to the peasant uprising that swept the northwest Central Plains in the late Ming Dynasty. Since then, peasant insurgents from all walks of life in the northwest have risen up in succession.

The Ming regime invested a lot of military power and financial resources, and attacked various rebel armies by military and political means. In the early days, part of the peasant uprising army was recruited (such as Liu Guoneng) and part was recruited (such as Gao Yingxiang). By the end of 1638, the uprising was at a low tide. Only Li Zicheng led the remnants to persist in opposing Ming in Shangluo Mountain.

In the middle of AD 1639, Zhang, Luo Rucai and others accepted the appeal of the Ming regime and rose up again to oppose the Ming Dynasty. Li Zicheng also rate Qingqi into Henan, playing the banner. After several years of fierce fighting with the Ming army and the differentiation and integration of some insurgents, all the insurgents finally gathered under Li Zicheng and Zhang, among which Li Zicheng was the most powerful.

1643 in March, Li Zicheng established political power in Xiangyang, known as Xinshun King. /kloc-in the first month of 0/644, Li Zicheng was formally established in Xi 'an with the title of Dashun.

At the beginning of 1644, Zhang led an army into Sichuan from Jingzhou. In June 5438+10 of the same year, Daxi regime was established in Chengdu.